Witnesses to History

The Kitsap Sun talked with people in Kitsap's African American community about what changed after the country elected Barack Obama.

Beth Fay of Bremerton and her sisters were active in the civil rights movement in Alabama. Now, she and one sister are going to the inauguration in Washington, D.C.

Beth Fay of Bremerton will attending inauguration ceremonies for president-elect Barack Obama next month. For Fay, a veteran of the civil rights movement, the inauguration of the country's first black president will be an emotional experience.
(LENNA HIMMELSTEIN | KITSAP SUN)

BREMERTON

Barely a teen, Beth Sanders went with friends to a Woolworth's diner, just to order and eat.

She understood that such a basic request was unlikely to be fulfilled. She and her friends were black, it was the 1950s, and they were in Birmingham, Ala.

"They never took our order," she said. Instead they called the police, who asked the youths to leave. Those youth, trained extensively to be non-violent, held hands and obliged.

At the time, she said, the goal of those kids didn't extend much beyond being able to order food from that counter.

'At the time, the most I could hope for was equal rights, period," said the former Beth Sanders, now Beth Fay of Bremerton. "It was important to make the choice to go to a movie. It was important to make the choice to go to whatever school I wanted to go to. It was important to be able to ride public transportation and not be told you had to sit at the back of the bus."

"Those were great motivators," Fay said.

As a teenager launching herself into a burgeoning civil rights struggle, she certainly wasn't thinking one day she would personally witness a black man taking the oath of office as President of the United States.

On Jan. 20 she will.

Fay will join her three sisters, veterans of the Birmingham children's marches of 1963, in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Cherry Rachal of East Bremerton, who joined the civil rights movement as a child in Oklahoma City, will also be there, witnessing history again.

In 1963 Rachal joined other kids in climbing the Abraham Lincoln statue inside the Lincoln Memorial to try to get a glimpse of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was delivering his now iconic "I Have a Dream" speech.

She saw that speech through the eyes of a teen, marveling more at the size of the crowd than at the message.

Both women look at what will happen on Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C. with gratitude and with wonder.

Both lived during the Jim Crow era, when "separate but equal" was clearly separate but hardly equal. Both saw the separation of white and black in schools, neighborhoods, bathrooms, public transportation, businesses and water fountains.

Fay's education on racism came gradually.

Not all white southerners were believers in the standards of the time. Fay knew and played with some white children. Once she got in school, though, she noticed the books her classes were using were hand-me-downs from the white schools and that white kids her age were being taught more advanced studies.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery and move to the back it launched the civil rights movement in earnest, she said.

Pastors and parents began organizing the movement quietly. Fay said the organization efforts were lengthy, because the leaders wanted to make sure that anything they did was within the law and that everyone involved was committed to remaining non-violent.

She participated in the sit-ins and was in a march when onlookers were throwing rocks and bottles at the marchers. Shortly after, she moved to Atlanta to go to school at Clark College. Two years later she was married and moved to Chicago, where she finished school.

She was watching television in Chicago one evening and saw footage of her sister Deborah being beaten by counterdemonstrators at an event in St. Augustine, Fla. She called her mother to find out how her sister was, but her mother didn't know anything had happened.

Deborah was hospitalized from the beating. Fay said it appears someone saved her by pulling her away from the fight.

Fay's sisters were among the hordes of black youth who in 1963 filled the jails of Birmingham, becoming known as "foot soldiers" in the civil rights movement.

The children led much of the demonstrations, Fay said, because many of the parents had jobs they didn't feel they could afford to lose.

In the Oscar-winning documentary, "Mighty Times: The Children's March," Dr. King tells a Birmingham audience that change would happen when they filled the jails. But when he asked for volunteers, it was the kids who stood up.

King didn't want to put the kids at risk, but those youths already had experience in nonviolent protest, and local leaders believed any counter-efforts would be gentler with the children. That was true, to a point, but Birmingham fire and police officials were ordered to bring out the fire hoses and dogs to hold back the groups.

Fay and Rachal said every demonstration was preceded by many prayers said and repeated admonitions to remain nonviolent. The protests were scary, but worth it, they said, even if it did just seem to be for a seat at the lunch counter, a drink from a fountain or an opportunity to learn.

Rachal's commitment to the movement happened after she learned to be proud to be black.

"As a child growing up I wished that I was white," Rachal said. "I really felt that all white people were rich, that they were smart. This was the image I had in my head growing up as a little girl in Oklahoma. To think of a black man ever being a John F. Kennedy? No."

That changed over time. Her commitment to the movement strengthened. She defended her father when he was pushed out of a grocery-store line and told by a white man to go to the back. She had her hand stepped on by a woman wearing a spiked heel at a restaurant entrance and heard the woman tell the business's owners to get the "(N-words)" out of there.

She sees divinity in the fact that she didn't become more militant. "It's only the grace of God that I didn't turn out to be Angela Davis," a radical civil rights leader who was long affiliated with the Communist Party in the U.S. "I could have easily been one. That was not my path to follow," she said.

As a young girl she would shop in downtown Oklahoma City with her family. They could buy what they wanted. If one of them needed to go the bathroom, it would involve a walk to outskirts to find the only store that would let blacks use those facilities.

As a college student at Wylie College in Marshall, Texas, she had to sit in the balcony at the town's only movie theater. It was a new experience. She had enjoyed sitting wherever she wanted as a younger child at the theater in her predominantly black neighborhood.

Despite all she saw and despite being an eyewitness, what King meant about judging someone by character rather than color didn't hit home until she moved to Bremerton. She was recruited here as one of five black teachers at the end of the '60s. After living life mostly in segregation, the racism she found here was subtle, institutionalized, she said.

She went to Central Washington University to get a master's degree in education administration, with a goal of starting out as an assistant vice-principal somewhere. She was turned down three times for not having any experience, while her white classmates walked out of the masters programs into principals' offices. "No one may come out and call you an 'N' word, but it's (racism) built into the system. It's very hard to put your finger on it sometimes," she said.

Now, Fay said, black kids have every reason to believe they can aspire to more.

One boy she knows "looked in the book at all the presidents that had been named there and he didn't see one face that looked like his," she said. With Obama's election, the boy understood: "If he wants to be president, it's possible. That became extremely important for these young children."

Rachal exercised faith eight days before the election, buying tickets to Washington, D.C. for Jan. 20, because she felt at peace that Obama was going to be elected.

Rachal, wife of a retired pastor and self-described "woman of faith," said she believes Obama's election was an "act of God."

"He's been chosen by God to be exactly where he is today," she said.

Rachal also believes that King, speaking the night before he was assassinated, may have seen this day coming when he said, "And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land."

For Fay the history is confirmation that "The struggle was not for nothing. Because this was a struggle for civil rights, for equal rights," she said. "This is probably the beginning of the change."